It is not to belittle Surrealist activity — as it has unfolded from 1924 to the present day — to consider it as a game, in fact as The Great Game, whose prizes in the eyes of those who played and lived it, can be calculated in promises of freedom, love, revolution, and in anything else that intransigent desire can aspire to.

Maybe that’s why this game they invented (which is so easy to play) has a lot in common with exceptional poetry. At times it hits home with an epiphanic jolt and even an aesthetic rush … and it’s full of metaphors, which Aristotle considered the mark of genius.*

The fact that we’re playing a game and we laugh a lot more than we usually do with poetry is a just a nice bonus.

*The greatest thing by far,” said Aristotle in the Poetics (330 BC), “is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblance.”